Perfect Poison (42 page)

“How were you financing that sort of habit?”

“Selling things I owned. I sold most of my furniture, sold most of John's [Wall] furniture. When I left the [VAMC] the year before, I took my thrift savings plan, spent all that. We had sold John's house in May of 1999, so we had a lot of money left over from that.”

“How much money was that?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

It got worse.

“And by the end of 1999,” Welch asked, “what happened to all that money?”

“I'm sorry?”

“By the end of 1999,
what happened
to all that money?”

“It was gone.”

In less than a year, Bledsoe and Wall had used a quarter of a million dollars worth of cocaine and heroin.

“As your resources dwindled, did you have to begin to steal things in order to support your habit?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What did you do?”

“I would go to Home Depot and shoplift items and return them for cash.”

Then Welch got into the cardiac episode that, according to Bledsoe, changed her life and sent her running for treatment.

Finishing up, Welch had her admit she was now a card-carrying member of Narcotics Anonymous.

“Do you also chair and teach [at] such meetings?”

“Yes, I do.”

“My last question to you, Ms. Bledsoe, is whether or not you were the only person to blame for your drug addiction?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Ms. Bledsoe, my name is David Hoose. I think you know me, don't you?”

“Yes, I do.”

That was the last time anything pleasant would come from David Hoose's mouth, as far as Bonnie Bledsoe was concerned. He had a job to do. He had a witness accusing his client of having in her possession an ampoule of the drug that the government was claiming she had killed patients with. It wasn't time to exchange pleasantries; it was time to let the jury know exactly who Bonnie Bledsoe was.

“[W]hen you're using drugs to the level you were using them, you learn a lot about deceptive behavior, don't you?” Hoose asked.

“Yes, you do.”

“You learn a lot about how to manipulate people and things, don't you?”

“Yes, you do.”

“And you
certainly
learn how to lie a lot, don't you?”

“. . . I didn't learn how to lie. No.”

“Well, when you were using drugs you told a lot of lies, didn't you?”

“Yes, I did.”

After several more questions regarding Bledsoe's reasoning behind not telling people she had used drugs, Hoose's voice getting louder with each word, he said, “And a couple of people that you particularly didn't want to know about your drug use history was Mr. Welch and Ms. Vuono, isn't that correct?”

“I figured they knew about it.”

“All right. That wasn't my question. You didn't want them to know, did you?”

“At one point, no.”

“All right. Now, what about Agent Plante, you didn't want him to know either, did you?”

“At one point, no.”

“Trooper Murphy, you didn't want him to know at one point either, did you?”

“At one point, no.”

“All right. And, in fact, you had met with all those people without telling them anything about your drug history, isn't that correct?”

“It was never asked of me.”

Hoose continued along these lines for quite a while, hoping to break Bledsoe down and get her to keep repeating that she had held back information. However, when it came down to it, the lies she had told had nothing to do with what she saw while working with Gilbert that cold night in January 1996. They were two separate issues. And Welch had been solid in his questioning, making sure to bring up the later dates, 1997, 1998, 1999, when Bledsoe's drug addiction was at its peak.

Bledsoe had an uncanny way of smiling while Hoose questioned her.

“Is this humorous to you? I notice you smiling a lot.”

“No, it's not.”

By the end of the day, Hoose wanted to convince the jury that what Bledsoe had said she saw on the night Michael Cascone coded was not at all what had happened.

“You can't be sure it was epinephrine, can you?”

“No . . .” Bledsoe answered, looking down toward the floor.

By the following day, December 20, word around the courthouse had it that David Hoose was just getting started with Bonnie Bledsoe. Today he was really going to get to the core of her credibility.

First thing in the morning, Hoose made sure the jury knew Bledsoe didn't just decide one day to quit her job at the VAMC, as Welch had suggested during his direct examination. Rather, she had been written up so many times for missing work because of her addiction to drugs that she was forced to leave.

But that was about it. Hoose didn't have much more.

Nonetheless, by the time Bledsoe left the stand, Hoose had planted in the jury's minds the theory that she and Wall lifted several ampoules of epinephrine from the VAMC at around the same period Gilbert was said to have used them to kill Jagodowski, Hudon, Cutting and Skwira.

When Hoose subpoenaed Wall and Bledsoe's medical records, he noticed that on several different occasions Bledsoe had asked to have a shot of epinephrine for her asthma. Yet on a few occasions, Hoose noted, Bledsoe had told the hospital or clinic that she had already taken a shot at home before coming in.

Who gave her the shot?

John Wall.

Hoose wanted to know if John Wall had stolen the epinephrine that he had given to her from the VAMC?

“No! He most certainly did not.”

Then he wanted to know if Bledsoe had.

“No, I did not.”

 

 

As April Gougeon began to testify later that same day, it was clear where Welch and Vuono were bringing the government's case against Gilbert next.

Gougeon told the jury about a phone call she had received one night from Gilbert where she talked about getting a new garter belt. During a code the next night, Gougeon explained, she saw Gilbert straddling a patient, like a horse, showing that same garter belt off to James Perrault, who was participating in the code.

She then talked about the night in November 1995 when Gilbert had come into the VAMC on her night off to get some potassium out of the medical supply closet. Gilbert claimed it was for her husband. On several occasions throughout her testimony, Gougeon praised Gilbert's nursing skills, claiming she outdid just about everybody else on the ward when it came to code work.

Most of the testimony now was geared toward one destination: the affair Gilbert had had with James Perrault. A clear picture of Gilbert and Perrault's burgeoning relationship during the fall of 1995 was beginning to develop, with the jury getting intimate glimpses into how the relationship heated up over the summer and fall.

While her coworkers filed up to the stand and spoke about how they viewed Gilbert during those crucial months of 1995 and the first months of 1996, Gilbert never once looked at any of them.

The jury, on the other hand, was heading into the holiday break with an earful of circumstantial evidence to chew on for the next twelve days. When they came back, things were going to get even more interesting. Kathy Rix, James Perrault, John Wall, Glenn Gilbert and, finally, Dr. Michael Baden were set, along with several other material witnesses, to finish out the government's case.

 

 

On Tuesday, January 2, 2001, court resumed. After Lori Naumowitz and Carl Broughear concluded their testimony, the government called one of its key witnesses: Kathleen Rix. If there was ever a doubt in the jury's mind at this point whether Gilbert had been responsible for the deaths at the VAMC, Welch and Vuono were confident Rix's testimony would wash it away.

However compelling Kathy Rix's narrative of finding broken ampoules of epinephrine might be, the government had been dealt a brutal setback over the holiday break. On a trip to Pennsylvania to visit Dr. Rieders to see how he was coming along with the toxicology tests he was conducting on the tissue samples, Welch and Vuono learned that the doctor had miscalculated some of his figures and made several mathematical errors.

Rieders's laboratory was said to be one of the only labs in the U.S. with the proper equipment to detect epinephrine in human tissue. Even so, a simple mathematical error tainted the entire batch of evidence. Rieders would get hammered for making the mistake, and the rest of his testimony would be suspect. Welch and Vuono realized they couldn't use it—which meant their entire case now relied on circumstantial evidence.

 

 

A hard-nosed, straight-to-the-point woman who held little back, Kathy Rix had not changed much since 1996. She was still the good-looking cop's wife from Westfield who had held on to perhaps one of the most important “nuggets” of information in the trial.

Rix may have broken down during those first few meetings with the HCI inspectors who had first arrived on the scene years ago, but she'd had several years to think about what she was going to say when she got on the stand.

“How long have you been a registered nurse?”

“Twenty-five years.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Welch had Rix run through her rather impressive credentials. By the time she was finished, spectators were asking themselves if there was anything Rix
hadn't
done within the medical community.

“How would you describe [the defendant's] professional skills as a nurse?”

Rix looked over at Gilbert, yet Gilbert kept her head down.

“Kristen was an excellent nurse. She had very good clinical skills, assessment skills.”

“What was her knowledge with respect to medications? Was it up to par?”

“Excellent.”

Short, quick responses. Rix said only what she had to, no more.

While Hoose continually objected to Welch's next line of questioning, Welch got Rix to talk about Gilbert's “bedside manner.” Rix said it was normal. But that was it. When Welch asked if it was better than anyone else's, Rix simply said “no,” over an objection by Hoose.

“What do you know about epinephrine and its effects?” Welch asked next.

“Epinephrine is a very powerful cardiac drug. It's an emergency drug. It causes the blood vessels in the periphery of the arms and legs to constrict and bring the blood flow to the torso and head. It raises a person's blood pressure and their pulse and helps, hopefully, to revive a person when used in an emergency.”

Next, Welch had Rix explain where ampoules of epinephrine were stocked, and which form the drug came in. He established through Rix that the Ward C nurses had full access to the drug and knew where the key to the satellite pharmacy was kept.

“During the time you worked at the VAMC . . . did you ever know the 1:1000 epinephrine [ampoules] to be used on Ward C or in the ICU?”

“No.”

Welch asked her if she had ever—in her ten years as a nurse at the VAMC—personally used the 1:1000 ampoules of epinephrine.

“Once.”

But it was after the fact, in 1998. And as Rix continued to tell the jury when and why she used it, Hoose objected to any further testimony.

But Ponsor continued to let Rix tell her story.

For the following half hour, Welch and Rix talked about Francis Marier. She went through Marier's vital signs—“stable, normal”—his mental status—“alert and orientated”—and how his blood sugar level continued to drop, even after he received several ampoules of D-50. At one point, Welch got Rix to confirm Gilbert had given Marier his shot of insulin at five
P.M.
, but still, eight hours later, his body was consuming the D-50 at levels like she had never seen.

Then it was on to how Gilbert had changed throughout the summer and fall of 1995. As Rix answered his questions, Welch kept an eye on the time. With the end of the day approaching, he had a plan.

By the time court broke at four o'clock, Welch had Rix drop a bombshell.

“When you looked in the medicine cabinet area of the ICU [in Thomas Callahan's room], into the round disposal needle bucket, what did you see?”

“I saw epinephrine vials broken and used.”

“How were you able to see these epinephrine broken vials?”

“You can look sort of in the half-moon hole, sort of shake it around and look.”

“When you saw the broken epinephrine vials, what was your reaction?”

“I was stunned.”

When court resumed the following day, Kathy Rix continued on the pace Welch had set when they broke the previous day. Following Ed Skwira's code, several weeks after Thomas Callahan's, Rix told the jury she had searched the medicine supply cabinet and noticed that the ampoules of epinephrine she had counted earlier that day were gone.

“I opened the drawer and there was no epinephrine. It was awful,” Rix said, looking jurors square in the eyes. “It made me sick.”

Then she told the story of how she, Renee Walsh and John Wall had gotten together sometime later and decided to turn Gilbert in.

“Thank you,” Welch said.

David Hoose had listened closely to every word. There were holes in Rix's story. But he didn't attack her account of finding the spent ampoules of epinephrine right away. Instead, he wanted to first bring into the record one of his theories: that because several nurses had a problem with Gilbert and Perrault's adulterous relationship, all these stories were somehow dreamed up to get back at her.

Rix gladly told jurors she felt Gilbert and Perrault's affair was wrong.

Hoose then asked Rix about her decision to forgo reporting what she had found in Thomas Callahan's room. He wanted to know why she hadn't told anyone beside John Wall about the discovery.

Rix said she was afraid Gilbert would find out.

When Hoose pressed, Rix said she was concerned with Timothy O'Donnell, the Chief of Security. She thought he would likely go running to Perrault, and then Gilbert would find out.

“Kristen could be very vindictive,” Rix said. “It was very likely that Jim would find out who was bringing the investigation.”

“Why didn't you take the used ampoules of epinephrine?” Hoose asked.

“What was the point?”

“To get the evidence that is
not
in front of the jury!” Hoose screamed.

It was a cheap shot. Rix, along with the rest of the nurses on Ward C, did not go to work every day looking for evidence of murder; they went to work to save lives. At the moment Rix found those spent ampoules of epinephrine, she didn't consider them to be “evidence” in the sense of the law. She viewed them as internal evidence that a friend and colleague had been killing patients.

 

 

After Kathy Rix came Carol McCarthy, a material witness, and Nancy Cutting, Kenny Cutting's wife. But all eyes weren't on Nancy's recollections of Kenny's life and death—the buzz in the room was that Gilbert's old beau, James Perrault, was set to take the stand as soon as Nancy finished.

Sure enough, with the end of the day approaching, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ariane Vuono called James Perrault.

Wearing a suit that looked a bit out of place on the muscular security guard's large frame, Perrault walked into the courtroom the same way he walked into any room: cocky, smug, full of himself. Having been in his twenties when he dated Gilbert, Perrault, now at thirty, had put on a little weight, but it was nothing that made him appear to be out of shape.

Gilbert didn't look at Perrault as he made his way through the aisle and onto the witness stand. She knew what Perrault had to say was going be devastating to her defense. He just had too many stories to tell that implicated her.

Vuono spent what little time she had left in the day going through Perrault's background, then setting the atmosphere of the medical emergencies he had participated in with Gilbert.

“It [the mood in the room] became more charged. There was more excitement in the air when we were working on a patient,” Perrault said before they broke for the day.

First thing the next morning, Vuono questioned Perrault about his relationship with Gilbert, along with her suicide attempts throughout the summer of 1996. Then it was on to what everyone in the room had been waiting for: Had Gilbert said anything to Perrault about her involvement in the deaths at the VAMC when he asked her about it?

“What was her response to your—”

Perrault couldn't even wait until Vuono finished the question.

“Initially, she was denying it. And I asked her . . . and her response—she became very upset at me and she stated, ‘I did it. I did it. I injected those guys with a certain drug.' ”

“What did she say after that?”

“She hung up the phone.”

There really wasn't anything more powerful James Perrault could offer the government than Gilbert's confession. After Vuono got it out of him, Perrault went through his entire relationship with Gilbert, all the times he had broken up with her, the night they had first made love, the drinking they had done at the VFW and his lack of concern for dating a married woman.

After a recess at 2:45, Vuono had only a few more questions for the brawny security guard, who was holding up rather well despite the fact that Hoose had sat the entire time directly in front of the witness stand, staring at Perrault, licking his chops.

Vuono wanted the jury to understand that Gilbert had gone over to her former home in Florence to try to retrieve “something”—meaning the
The Handbook of Poisoning
—while Glenn and the kids were on vacation.

“What did she tell you [about that incident]?”

“She stated that . . . she had tried to go into the house . . . [and] that her father-in-law would not allow her into the house . . .”

“Did she tell you why she was attempting to enter the home at that time?”

“She stated that she needed to retrieve ‘something,' but she didn't identify it.”

“I have no further questions.”

Hoose stood and walked, sluggishly, toward the podium. He looked tired and weak, as if he had aged ten years during the past two months. With large circles under his eyes, he was much thinner since the start of the trial.

One man later said Hoose reminded him of “Ichabod Crane” at that point of the trial.

With all due respect, David Hoose had carried the load. Weinberg and Miles did a lot of sitting while Hoose did a lot of the questioning.

He immediately questioned Perrault's integrity, insinuating that although he knew he was dating a married woman, he still did it without reservation. Perrault answered Hoose's questions with short “yes-no” answers, not elaborating too much.

As the day moved on, Hoose led Perrault down a path of the defense's good-cop, bad-cop theory.

“They told you Kristen Gilbert is going down and you're going down with her, and that's going to be the end of your career [as a cop], is that right?”

“That was implied.”

Hoose plugged Perrault for hours, trying to get him to admit the reason why Gilbert had been so “charged” during all those codes was perhaps because she had been thrilled about the new relationship she was getting involved in.

“Is it a fair statement to say that by the end of October the two of you were, if not in love . . . pretty infatuated with each other?”

“We were attracted, yes.”

“And it was fun, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

“It was exciting, wasn't it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“And Kristen seemed excited by the attention that you were giving her, didn't she?”

“Yes, she did.”

“And she seemed to enjoy it, didn't she?”

“Yes.”

“She got a new haircut, didn't she?”

“I don't recall . . .”

“She began to lose weight, is that correct?”

“I don't recall . . .”

“Did she begin dressing differently?”

“Yes.”

“She began dressing more sexy, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“You liked that, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“You encouraged it, didn't you?”

“Yes.”

“You have no recollection of her losing about thirty pounds and getting her hair cut?”

“No . . .”

“If you ever get married, you better notice those things. . . .” Hoose said, as the courtroom broke out in laughter.

Before court recessed, Perrault told the jury Gilbert had been under a tremendous amount of stress back in January 1996 because of her grandfather's death, her pending divorce, and an “abnormal pap smear” she'd had that month.

On Monday, January 8, Perrault was back on the stand.

“You indicated something to Ms. Vuono along the lines of whether . . . [Ms. Gilbert's] husband was abusing her. Do you recall that?”

“Yes.”

“Isn't it true that you asked Ms. Gilbert all the time if Glenn was physically abusing her?”

“During our conversation she admitted that he had been abusive and we discussed that.”

“Isn't it true,
sir,
that she told you that he only ever touched her once and that it wasn't a big deal?”

“No . . .”

“And isn't it true that every time she would see Glenn and be upset that you would say, ‘Is he physically abusing you'?”

“No, that's not true.”

Hoose realized he wasn't getting anywhere and moved on to how “upset” and “distressed” Gilbert was about the investigation during the beginning of March, April and May. When he didn't get anywhere with that, he asked Perrault about his military training and his desire to become a bonafide cop, hoping to get the jury to believe that everything Perrault had done after that point was done with the mindset that he wanted to make an impression on the local cops.

For the first time during the trial, Hoose then brought into light the possibility of a second suspect.

“Did you know Jeff Begley?”

“Yes.”

“He was a nurse on Ward C?”

“Yes, he was.”

“And would you agree with me that Mr. Begley was a pretty weird guy?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Ariane Vuono lashed out.

Ponsor told Hoose to rephrase the question.

“Well, was Mr. Begley someone that you knew to be having problems with other people on the ward?”

“He seemed to be, yes.”

“In fact, were you aware that other people were refusing to work with him?”

“No, I wasn't.”

“Objection!”
This time Vuono stood up, threw up her hands, and rolled her eyes.

“Overruled.”

“In any event, had you heard any rumors about the investigation initially, in the early stages, focusing on Mr. Begley?”

“Not that I recall.”

After several more questions, trying unsuccessfully to get Perrault to indict Jeff Begley, Hoose moved on. He tried, almost desperately at times, to poke holes into the theory that it could have been someone else and that Gilbert hadn't done anything out of the ordinary, but it failed time and again.

Then Hoose brought up Perrault's testimony during the grand jury investigation, and how what he had said was different from what he had said just days ago in court.

“[Do] you remember being asked specifically [during the grand jury] what Ms. Gilbert had said to you . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“And did you say that ‘she called back . . .' stating that... ‘I did it. I did it. You wanted to know. I killed all those guys . . .'”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you told the grand jury . . . ?”

“Yes.”

No matter how it was sliced, James Perrault had brought to the table some pretty solid evidence that Kristen Gilbert had admitted to her part in the crimes she was on trial for. How she chose to put that confession into words was irrelevant.